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Thursday 4 December 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
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Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
Daniel, F E
(1839-1914) US medical doctor, publisher, teacher and author; he served in the American Civil War as a surgeon, and among other positions served as President of the American Congress on Tuberculosis, 1905-1906. Of sf interest is his one novel, The Strange Case of Dr Bruno (1906), which describes the Invention of a Drug capable of putting subjects into Suspended Animation, thus ...
Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea
Japanese animated film (2008; vt Ponyo); original title Gake no Ue no Ponyo. Studio Ghibli. Directed and written by Hayao Miyazaki. Voice cast includes Yūki Amami, Hiroki Doi, Yuria Nana and George Tokoro. 101 minutes. Colour. / Whilst playing by the sea, five-year-old Sōsuke (Doi) finds a trapped fish whose head appears almost human. Rescuing it, he cuts his finger, which the fish licks. He names ...
Roberts, Wilfred Joseph
(1898-1976) UK illustrator, active from the early 1930s, almost exclusively for magazines and publishers whose works were deemed ephemeral, so that much of his output remains obscure; he is thought to have normally signed his work W J Roberts, W F Roberts or L J Roberts, though much may be anonymous or under other names. He is credited in this encyclopedia for three volumes of the Gees sequence by E Charles Vivian writing as Jack Mann, ...
Pirandello, Luigi
(1867-1936) Italian playwright and author whose prolific career began with poetry – Mal Giocondo ["Unhappy Joy"] (coll 1889) – and continued with a large amount of short fiction, beginning with Amori senza Amore (coll 1894). Many of his circa 400 stories and sketches, many of them Contes-Cruels [for this term, plus entry on Pirandello with fantasy linkings, see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...